Robaggio

Here's a nifty little spin on things. It's not my belief or anything, but it definatly gets you thinking.

First, here's some advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI):

Consider that I have a simulation in which a 6 legged creature resides in a 3 dimentional world. The creature resembles an insect in that it is bilaterally symmetrical (3 legs on each side). The goal of the simulation is to get the creature to walk.

For AI to be true, the method of walking cannot be implied, even the satisfaction of it. Meaning, that if the creature ends up "walking" and meeting the simulation's goal, the simulation does not know the goal has been met. This way, if the creature ends up "learning", it's done through complete random chance rather than satisfying a set of sequences like a trail of bread crumbs.

The only givens in the simulation are the following:
1) The creature can move it's legs and it does so.
2) The world has gravity. Enough that if the creature could walk, it would do so comfortably.
3) The world moves forward in time.

This is all that the simulation starts with. So, how does the creature learn to walk? It does so by reducing chaos.

Consider this: Imagine there are 8 ways of monitoring the creature.
1) Balance - Pretend the creature has a vial of fluid in on it's back, much like a level, which, when level, the monitored "balance" is relatively centered and low. When the vial is not level, the monitored balance fluxuates very high (depending on how 'unlevel' the creature's back is)
2) Stress - The more the creature moves, the higher this is monitored. The less the creature moves, the smaller this is monitored. You can equate this to physical exhertion.
3-8) Leg values - These monitor the current activity of the legs. As legs move, flail, or whatnot, their monitored levels fluxuate. As they move in unison or 3 by 3, numbers fluxuate less. You could say that they are more 'ordered'.

If you're familliar with programming, pretend that these are 8 different variables representing the current status of the creature.

When the simulation starts, the creature initially lies on the ground. It's balance level is fluxuating madly- it's not balanced. It's legs are flailing all around because they are moving, yet, without direction. Additionally, the creature's stress level is high since there's a lot of activity going on. The creature "learns" to walk through it's programming, which exhibits a desire to eliminate chaos. Imagine that through random chance, the creature moves its legs such that it stands up and balances itself for a moment. When it does this, its balance variable fluxuates less. The creature is programmed to eliminate chaos- thus, when a variable becomes more 'ordered', it remembers the sequence it performed to achieve that state. When the creature remembers a sequence, it has a tendancy to perform it again, but with minute differences- doing so could 'order' it's variables even further. As time goes on, the creature's variables become less and less chaotic because the creature begins to exhibit more and more order.

The creature 'learns' through eliminating randomness and chaos by developing a pattern through which its monitored values fluxuate less and less.

Throughout my life I've heard many stories of old speaking of how life was created out of the "time before man" where chaos reigned. Old cultures seemed to believe that life is order or that life is the absense of chaos. I find it interesting that life, even if artificial, is based on the concept of reducing chaotic values. Our existence is the result of attempts at order. Evolution is the act of reducing chaos. Human culture is ordered as well- we order our world through language and other symbols. It's very interesting to think about. I'm sure some people will see this as another excuse for intelligent design or some other futile attempt at understanding. However, you could also point out that this model indeed shows the bleak reality which is beyond our ordered scope of existence: chaos & nothingness.

C4 Diesel

For one, I do not find the "chaos & nothingness" to be the "bleak reality" that would be if it were not for us being here. The world would be a beautiful, magnificent place even without us. There's nothing to me that makes any of the universe "bleak", but I guess thats really just subjective, and I may have misinterpreted what you meant anyway.

Although I like the idea about reducing chaos, that's not the only important factor here. A creature has to understand (and I consider this a much more difficult concept as far as AI goes) how to have a controlled chaos as well, as there are many things in life that would not be considered "orderly".

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Hain

That is an interesting way of thinking about AI. I have read some on the subject and it was never put like that--levels that are designed to balance out.

Just to pose a question to someone who would know:
Could an AI create new "levels" and "variables" that need to be balanced out for itself? And if so could it understand itself? Meaning that it would be able to view itself as its code and alter it like that. Lets say... remove redundant code to be more efficient?

Looking at a humans, we developt mentally like this. Only instead of levels of balance, it is in terms of how other react to ourt actions: parents feelings of anger and love towards an action, friends and strangers' reactions to your behavior. It is all a large cycling process of human "programming" human responces in us.

I don't know this AI thread was just something that caught my attention and I'd like to continue on with it.

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d*d

has this tendancy been programmed in? this just doesn't sound like AI to me it's just a loop. rendering your observation that artificial life is merely the elimination of chaos meaningless

munchen

Wouldn't the least chaotic situation be if it did absolutly nothing?

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Robaggio

d*d: It is a loop. Simulations run by looping many many many times. Just because it's a loop however, does not meant that conditions cannot change each iteration of that loop. If the creature did something to satisfy order in one iteration, it 'remembers' the sequence which gave it order. Then, on subsequent iterations of the loop, it would have a greater tendancy to perform that sequence again rather than exhibit complete randomness. The only reason the creature would have a "tendancy" to repeat a sequence rather than have it being manditory is to prevent itself from becoming bottlenecked down a particular path of order. Not all sequences lead to additional sequences of continued order- therefore, while the creature would have a desire to repeat ordered sequences, it wouldn't be mutually exclusive enough so that it didn't find more ordered sequences. This mirrors evolution: Through some sequence, we are able to reproduce. It is an orderly one- the sequences involved in the creation of a new human being are very ordered, yet, there's still implicit randomness. Mutation can occur every time a cell divides. You could think of it this way: the human body has a tendancy or desire to divide it's cells in an orderly fashion, however, you can see that it still exhibits some randomness.

Augi: Advanced AI can and does create new levels and variables to monitor itself. Each time a desirable sequence occurs, it monitors that sequence with a new variable. It compares each sequence with one another, prioritizing and ordering sequences based on their chaoticness. The AI is able to 'forget' sequences (code). As time goes on, the probability of certain sequences occuring tends to go down- this is forgetting- if a sequence isn't favorable in reducing variables from fluxuating, then it doesn't exhibit the sequence as much and it is eventually phased out. There are many evolutionary traits that were once favorable to have as humans. The genetic code exists to still produce the traits, but, in lieu of more desireable and less chaotic ones, they don't get exhibited. In other words, our bodies "forget" to display them. A good example is seen in the ammount of body hair we have. At some point in our evolution, we started to lose dense hair all over our bodies. Some people still exhibit this trait (think: bearded ladies or "monkey boy" - people with thick hair covering their whole body), which reinforces the fact that while certain sequences are more desirable, it does not mean that they will be exhibited all the time.

munchen: The universe is working towards a state of inert uniformity: energy is degredating and diffusing to the point where it is no longer in a useful form. This is called entropy, and while the typical view of entropy is equated to chaos and disorder, in terms of energy uniformity, it's actually the perfect state of order: it's the point at which energy stops changing. When energy stops changing, time is effected. Time is the monitor of change. If things stop changing, then time ceases to pass or even exist. If something did nothing, it indeed would be perfectly ordered. However, this cannot be done as long as energy is active and time exists. It is assumed that since the creature exists in the world, energy is not constant. I stated that there was gravity in the simulation- this would imply that some form of energy is present and changing, thus the existence of chaos. It is unreasonable to have the creature do nothing, as this would imply that the world is at equilibrium and thus ordered to begin with. The key factor here is that the environment the creature exists in is innately chaotic. You need not know why the creature wants to order itself, only the fact that it has that desire.

You see, it would be very easy for life to stop attempting to create order from chaos. However, it isn't neccisarilly life which is attempting order, but rather chaos which orders itself. For example, the basic building blocks of life occur naturally outside of life itself. The phospholipid bilayer that makes up the cell wall occurs naturally in aquatic environments. The desire to create order is a manifestation of chaos itself. Given this, all 'higher level' desires (such as the creature's desire to reduce randomness or human's desire to procreate in a certain sequence) are derivatives of what exists naturally. I do not know the point at which life 'started' and began taking a set course through evolution. It is interesting to think however, that beginning life was being pushed and molded through chaos falling into order. Everything that happens afterwords is irrelivant- life's goal is to reduce chaos.

C4 - The bleak nothingness I speak of was more of a religious poke. It has been theorized by humans and religion to believe that we exist in some grander scheme of things. I was trying to point out that chaos seems to order itself naturally. The "bleak reality" is me trying to say that ordered existence exists naturally. That the order we exhibit, the order that energy exhibits, is merely a natural occurance of existence itself. It seems bleak to take it at face value. However, this is only because people have a tendancy to puff themselves up- to make themselves feel special, or to just be able to sleep better at night knowing that whatever happens everything will be O.K. because "god loves you". Bleakness is: existence *just is*. It's only bleak because it's the way things are. (Seems circular, doesn't it? )

Johnny Rotten

But evolution isn't necessarily refinement. It isn't necessarily improvement. What is better suited for that particular situation is what survives. A giraffe, while quite adept at eating leaves in very high places, wouldn't be at home in a marine environment.

Homo sapiens sapiens look like a very dynamic, adaptable race, but we've only been around for 120,000-100,000 years. Yet as recently as the 19th century, we managed to kill 40 million bison. Imagine every other family in America having a bison in their home instead of a television at the beginning of the century, and seeing them stuffed in museums by the end of it.

I don't think that intelligence or evolution necessarily bring order. Intelligence brings with it the desire to organize and categorize, but all one manages to do is add a layer of labels to different groups of variables, rather than reducing those variables. That is "order" of our human culture.

This theory of evolution and order also seems to require an eventual utopian state. While that may occur on a cosmological level, I don't think humans will be waving that victory banner at the end of the day. At the rate we poison the air we breath, the water we drink and the food we eat...at the rate of our population growth...and at the rate of resource depletion...all signs instead point to a cataclysm that approaches at a geometric rate.

So, in a way, I think this idea is correct. But I also think the chaos that will be eliminated to acheive order includes us. Many deists make the assumption that their creator god has only us in mind and that our prosperity is an important step in a greater plan, as long as we pay our respects. The near-apocalyptic degradation of society has been trumpeted since the 1600s, but it has generally been a matter of not being proper worshippers, instead of being flawed.

Since I've gone off the philosophical deep end here, I might as well enjoy the fall: You see, when I look at society, I see concentric layers that mirror the progression of matter: atoms resemble solar systems, which rotate around galaxies. The children revolve around their parents, who revolve around their professional and social circles. But what does humanity revolve around? Is there a meta-grouping that's missing from the picture? We seem to have an overall behavioral pattern that resembles that of the orphan. The creator god is a parent of a kind, but he exists only in the abstract, albeit firmly accepted as law by the masses. I am either too cowardly or cynical to fall in line, although I do believe there is much about death and the dead that we do not understand.

So, in a way, I think think the quoted idea is wrong. I do not believe that our existence is the result of attempts at order. It is merely a result.

Robaggio

I know evolution isn't always refinement. It's random- however, when it does find a sequence that reduces chaos, it has a tendancy to repeat it. Not all sequences of order lead to additional ones. Moreover, not all sequences are perfect.

I'm not saying that humans are more ordered evolutionary wise. I was just trying to point out the interesting fact that before the theory of evolution was ever presented, humans believed that they were (or life was), the result or absolution of order in the universe.

Some of my facts or concepts might be a bit off. And I don't neccisarilly think some are valid anyway. I'm mostly trying to play devil's advocate from this different perspective. Try to look at the perspective on a whole rather than the specific facts used to 'argue' it.

Another interesting way of looking at things is to think of life as the "bringer of death". When we use energy and change it from state to state, bit by bit, parts of it fall to entropy. Just by exisiting, we are moving the universe towards a uniform state of energy. Think of how much energy we utilize- if humans didn't exist, the overal entropy of Earth would be much less. You could say, that because we bring about the most entropy (order), that we are perhaps the most ordered. Or maybe that's being too arrogant. Perhaps life itself is ordered in the hopes that eventually it will bring the universe to a state of complete entropy and thus complete order?